Environmental issues are hot these days. Everyone’s talking about green this, environmentally-friendly that – whether it’s in a favorable or unfavorable tone. For some of us, green living and discussion of green living are positive facets of life, but others find all of it oppressive, annoying, and preachy. Buzzwords can become the focus of all things irritating about the green movement. They can also lose their meaning over time as they’re repeated over and over and as nouns become verbs and verbs become nouns in the common vernacular. Once in a while I’d like to take a step back and to reflect on what a particular buzzword in the green world truly means.
Okay. Let’s talk sustainable, then. What does sustainable mean, in terms of greenness and the environment? The dictionary actually gives us much of the answer. Something that is sustainable can support, can endure, can be maintained. In the green world, we’re usually talking about sustainable resources, such as food and energy. So when we say something is grown, harvested, or produced sustainably, we really mean that it’s done with little or no harm to the environment and not at a rate that outstrips its natural replenishment. In short, it doesn’t hurt anything to produce it and we’re not in danger of using it up.
Petroleum is not produced, obtained, or used sustainably. We make gasoline as a by-product of its processing, which in turn releases carbon dioxide when used for fuel in motor vehicles. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. As we’re learning from the leak in the Gulf, the obtaining of oil via drilling can be devastating to the environment in a worst-case scenario and not good at all for it in the best of times. At some point, probably within the next decade, we will likely reach peak oil, which is when production will decline because oil is used up faster than it can be obtained.
Solar power is sustainable because we aren’t in danger of running out of sunlight. Until the sun goes supernova, it’s in endless supply, since it’s not actually consumed as such. It does take energy to produce the solar panels that allow us to harness solar energy, but the energy payback rate means they produce much more energy than it takes to make them, at least with current technology. It’s a common misunderstanding that it takes more energy to make solar panels than they will produce over a lifetime, but that’s not actually true.
Making paper with old growth and rain forest trees is not sustainable, and hemp is a much better, much more sustainable choice because it grows so quickly and is so low-maintenance.
Food can be produced in sustainable and unsustainable ways as well. Overworked fields and methods that contribute to topsoil erosion are obviously not sustainable agriculture methods. Neither is our current model of food production, which requires that we ship food long distances.
So that’s what sustainable is. What is sustainable not? It’s not organic, as the organic label doesn’t guarantee the food inside was produced sustainably, if we are using the entirety of the definition we’ve put forth. It doesn’t have to be vegan or vegetarian, although there’s plenty of overlap there. Producing meat requires much more energy, water, and land than producing grains and vegetables, and the world’s food stores would last much longer if everyone ate a plant-based diet, but there are still sustainable or more sustainable ways to produce meat. Sustainable also doesn’t always mean avoiding a particular food, a particular method of production, or a particular behavior, but in certain cases it can mean consuming less of something. All the same, Americans aren’t very good at that. We don’t like to sacrifice, but we’ll gladly buy things to solve a problem. I think trying to encourage people to do without will meet with a lot of resistance, perhaps too much to make enough progress, so I’m all in favor of finding alternative methods and energies to sustain (ha, see what I did there?) our current way of life. Electric cars powered by solar panels, anyone? It happens. It could happen a lot more.
We hear a lot of talk about sustainability lately. Next year, the hot buzzword may be something else. Ever notice how no one talks about being carbon-neutral anymore? In 2007, carbon-neutral was all the rage. Let’s hope we’re honing our thinking rather than flitting from one concept to the next.
